Murmurs: Review Board Just Says No to Hospital Merger

REVIEW BOARD JUST SAYS NO TO HOSPITAL MERGER: An all-volunteer community review board dealt a blow this week to Oregon Health & Science University’s 19-month quest to purchase Legacy Health when it voted unanimously to recommend that state regulators reject the deal. Members of the board, convened by the Oregon Health Authority’s Health Care Market Oversight division, raised concerns about rising care costs, which often happen in the wake of hospital mergers. They also recommended that OHSU heed recent public outcry over conditions at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, home to 5,600 monkeys bred and used for experiments. The board has no authority to block OHSU’s purchase, but regulators are required to take the recommendation into account. Just five of the original nine members of the review board were present for the vote. One, Christina Davis, left months ago. Jerry Dalnes and Joanna Mott left last week after a Portland woman raised questions about conflicts of interest. Neither was found to have one, but they resigned anyway. The sixth member, Latorria Haskin, was on Tuesday’s Zoom meeting at first, but couldn’t be summoned for the vote. Reached by email, Haskin, a medical billing specialist, according to her LinkedIn profile, said, “Unfortunately, I had to step away at that time.” An OHA spokeswoman said Haskin had an emergency.

FAMILY SUES URBAN FORESTRY OVER FALLEN TREE: Sarah and Joel Bond sued the city’s Urban Forestry division and city forester Jenn Cairo on April 4 over the division’s decision not to grant a tree removal permit for a Douglas fir that would later fall on the Bonds’ Southwest Portland home. The Bonds are demanding $4.7 million in economic and emotional damages from the city, alleging the tree inspector who denied the tree removal permit in 2022 failed to spot signs of tree decay. The Bonds, who are also suing on behalf of their two minor children, allege that Cairo established a “culture within Urban Forestry that leads to an unreasonably rigid enforcement of the Tree Code” and “prohibits staff from exercising discretion to meet the needs of citizens.” A recent WW cover story examined the city’s strict enforcement of the Tree Code under Cairo’s leadership (“The Taking Tree,” March 5). Those practices are now under scrutiny by the Portland City Council, which peppered Cairo with questions at a hearing last week. Portland Parks & Recreation and Urban Forestry vigorously defended their policies, while a climate advocate derided WW’s coverage as skewed. The city and Urban Forestry declined to comment on the lawsuit, as is common with pending litigation.

HIGH SCHOOL COSTS REMAIN HIGH: Portland Public Schools released cost breakdowns April 7 for its upcoming high school rebuilds, and the numbers are still sky-high. Across three projects that would have totaled to about $1.4 billion, the district estimates it could save anywhere between $33 million and $67 million. The revised budgets for modernizations at Jefferson, Cleveland and Ida B. Wells high schools are the first numbers attached to these projects since an Oct. 21 School Board meeting in which multiple board members raised concerns the high schools would be among the most expensive in the nation. In the months since, the board has tried to cut costs behind the scenes as it refers a $1.83 billion school bond to voters in the upcoming May election. PPS’s preliminary estimates show rebuilding Jefferson would cost between $458 million and $466 million, down from a previous estimate of $491 million ($366 million of that would come from the district’s 2020 bond); Cleveland would cost between $450 million and $462 million, down from $469 million; and Wells would cost $440 million to $452 million, down from $455 million. Those savings are a far cry from the more than $100 million the district hoped to save per project back in the fall. The savings would come primarily from trimming square footage across the projects, and district officials stressed these were preliminary estimates. “Several factors may influence these projections, including potential schedule delays, escalation changes, and tariff fluctuations,” they wrote in a staff memo. “Additionally, the teams are actively reviewing project details to identify further cost-saving opportunities.”

MONKEY ADVOCATES BLOW DOGE WHISTLE: Animal rights activists aiming to force the closure of the Oregon National Primate Research Center wrote to the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency this week urging it to cut funding for the facility because it conducts “wasteful, duplicative, and unethical experiments on nonhuman primates.” The center got $56 million of its $63 million budget last fiscal year from the National Institutes for Health, and DOGE is already in court fighting to slash NIH grants. The tactic is the latest—and perhaps boldest—among many undertaken by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine to close the center run by Oregon Health & Science University. The committee has amped up its efforts this year, betting that regulators could force OHSU to shutter the primate center as a condition of its proposed purchase of Legacy Health. PCRM leaders addressed their April 8 letter to DOGE agent Gavin Kliger, a University of California, Berkeley-educated computer scientist who has shared social media content by white supremacist Nick Fuentes and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate, according to the Reuters news agency. Asked if they had any qualms about calling upon an agency that has slashed funding for human health, the committee’s Janine McCarthy said in an email the “appeal to DOGE isn’t an endorsement of its broader agenda—it’s a strategic effort to redirect an existing drive for cuts toward something that urgently needs attention: federally funded animal experiments that are wasteful, duplicative, and lacking in scientific or ethical reasoning.” OHSU defended its primate work. “Animal studies at OHSU are only conducted when other non-animal research methods—such as laboratory-based cell culture, simulation, gene chips or computer modeling—are scientifically inadequate and/or when experimental designs are too dangerous for human participants,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email.